


Regrets+Recoveries

by JustAnotherWriter (N1ghtshade)



Series: Wunderkind 0.5 [2]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Jack is a good dad, Minor Riley whump, Pre series Wunderkind, Survivor Guilt, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:49:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27126790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N1ghtshade/pseuds/JustAnotherWriter
Summary: Maybe she deserves to suffer. Because she came home, and Nick didn’t. Her partner, her boyfriend is floating somewhere in Lake Como (even a dredge team failed to find the body, although according to Patty an unsolved disappearance just became an open murder case thanks to that operation) and they have to tell Nick’s mother her son is never coming back home.Pre-Series Wunderkind, for Whumptober 2020 Day 19 (Broken Hearts)
Relationships: Jack Dalton (MacGyver TV 2016) & Riley Davis
Series: Wunderkind 0.5 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947766
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15





	Regrets+Recoveries

It’s far from the first time Riley’s almost drowned. But it sucks every single time. 

“I know it hurts, kiddo, but you have to cough that out.” Jack’s hand is warm and solid on her back, helping brace her against the pain. She doesn’t have broken ribs, just bruised ones this time, but the bullet wound in her shoulder throbs with every breath, much less the harsh coughs. “You don’t want pneumonia.”

_ YOU don’t want me to get pneumonia, _ she feels like snapping back. But she doesn’t have the air to do it. 

She deserves to suffer. Because she came home, and Nick didn’t. Her partner, her boyfriend is floating somewhere in Lake Como (even a dredge team failed to find the body, although according to Patty an unsolved disappearance just became an open murder case thanks to that operation) and they have to tell Nick’s mother her son is never coming back home. 

Riley wonders if maybe things would have been better if Jack hadn’t pulled her out.

She quashes that in the next moment. She knows Jack would tell her the same things if she voiced it. He did after Nepal. When they were sitting in a very similar position, her hacking up the last of the remnants of the waterboardings and him helping brace her broken ribs. 

_ “You should have left me. I got half a team killed. I’m a liability.” It could happen again. If leaving her to die in that cave would save six more people down the road, why shouldn’t that have been her fate?  _

_ “You gotta stop thinking that way. Okay? They damn well sure thought you were worth dying for. You can’t let that be for nothing. I know sometimes you wonder why you walked away. That’s part and parcel of the life we live. But you are not worth any less because of what happened back there.” Jack’s eyes are dark with his own demons. Riley’s seen them come out to play before. But now, they seem stronger than ever. “You’re not meant to pay the price for their lives. This is the job we all agreed to. Things we can’t control happen…” _

_ “But I could have.” Riley swallows. She doesn’t know if the mission report had the missing piece. The reason that team is dead and she was captured. It is her fault. And maybe Jack just doesn’t know. _

_ A selfish part of her wants to keep the secret. Everyone else who knows she missed the security layer embedded in the mainframe is dead. But she knows what happens when agents lie about their involvement in an op gone bad. Charliss from exfil ODed on his prescription just last week, and the scene techs found a scribbled apology where he admitted to leaving the agent he was supposed to retrieve because he heard gunfire, and that he’d lied about the exfil location being overrun with hostiles.  _

_ “I missed the camera feeds from the monitors.” She’d realized too late that the computers themselves were part of security, recording the faces of their users. By the time she got into the network, she’d been identified as an intruder. And that’s when the whole building locked down, and… _

_ She physically shakes off the memories of gunfire and screams and hot blood splattering her cheek when the last agent protecting her fell.  _

_ “I was too fast. I didn’t scan the whole system for video feeds. And I got them killed.”  _

_ “Ops go bad all the time. Doesn’t matter if it was someone’s fault or no one’s. You didn’t want that to happen. And that’s what matters.” Jack’s voice is soft. “Nothing is going to bring those men back. Living or dying you can’t change that. So you might as well keep going and make what they did count for something.” _

Still, it feels like it was all for nothing. She’s looking at months of PT, and even then an iffy chance on field reassignment. Jack insists she’ll be fine, that if he’s still active with the kind of damage he’s sustained, she’s got a great chance, but it feels hollow. 

She coughs again, then leans back against the pillows, feeling drained. Thinking about everything outlined on the PT schedule she was handed today is exhausting. She knows, like any other injury, she’ll eventually fall into the pattern of taking recovery a day at a time. But at the moment, it’s daunting. 

She messed up. Again. This time because she was trying to save Nick’s life. And Jack’s. And her own. She has to fix this. Because she can’t have let Nick die for nothing. She’s going to get back on her feet and get that virus back before it can be used, and she’s going to make what happened at Lake Como count for something. 

She turns to Jack. “Help me up.”

“You just stopped hacking up a lung.”

“Yeah, well, this paper says I can resume mild physical activity today. I just want to walk to the bathroom.”

Jack sighs, but gets an arm under her shoulder and helps her swing her legs over the side. He knows better by now than to argue with her about this. Besides, it’s been her turn to try unsuccessfully to keep him on bed rest before. 

Just the hobble across the room and then back is exhausting, and she’s trying to catch her breath by the time Jack helps her sit down. He frowns, but doesn’t say anything. At first, he used to try and argue with her. When he realized that only made her more stubborn, he started relying on gently critical glances. They’re much harder to rebuff. She glances away to focus on the overlapping leaf pattern on the hospital gown over her lap. 

She knows he doesn’t want her to overstrain herself. It’s going to be worse and take longer if she wears herself out. But she suddenly needs to be doing. To be moving forward.

_ So what if it’s only a different kind of survivor’s guilt? It’s a productive kind at least. _

Her shoulder throbs again. She needed surgery to fix the damage the bullet did, and according to the doctors she’s lucky it missed her heart. It feels like her heart’s the center of the impact, though, the deep raw wound throbbing in time with each beat. She thinks she remembers screaming when Jack put pressure on it, on the beach, but she’s not sure. The raw throat could easily have been from the lake water. Or the breathing tube. 

She feels both numb and strangely electric-tingly. Like the aftereffects of a taser. Her muscles are twitchy from lack of use, and her hands shake slightly where she rests them on her knees. The nail polish is chipped, and she zeroes in on that. Anything to avoid looking Jack in the eyes again. If she does, he’ll see how desperate she is to get out of here and make things right.

“Every agency out there is looking for Kendrick,” Jack says, as if he’s read her mind. “Chances are one of them’s gonna get him any day now.” 

“I could find him faster. If someone would give me a damn computer.”

“You know you can’t use your rig in an ICU.” Jack shakes his head. “Besides, that facial rec program still isn’t done, is it?”

Riley shrugs. FRIAR is buggy, yeah. But she’s sure it’s good enough to comb the web for Kendrick. There are millions of phone cameras and social media posts and traffic cams and security recordings out there. He has to be somewhere. 

Her fingers twitch and tap on the cloth stretched tight over her knees, like it’s a keyboard. She needs her computer, or her phone, or her tablet, or something. Anything. 

The electric vibrating has turned itself up a notch. It’s not a taser anymore, it’s a cattle prod. Burning and painful and endless. The scar on her lower ribs tingles at the thought. 

She runs her fingers of her good hand through her hair. The strands are rough and limp; hospital shampoos are harsh and strip all the oils out. Her hair’s going to be a frizzy mess for weeks until she’s done enough oil treatments and worked in enough shea butter to get the shiny curls back. It’s as bad as post-hair-dye frizz. She always (obviously) needs to bleach it to change color, and that sucks. Thankfully, she doesn’t have to do that nearly as often as some agents. She’s not really an undercover type. 

She sighs, letting her hand drop back to her lap. Her shoulder aches just from that much movement. She hates how fast lying flat on her back in a hospital bed eats away at muscle tone she works hard to keep up. It always makes PT that much worse. 

Jack eases her back down to lay flat on the bed again, readjusting the IV stand they’d been dragging around with them. “You want anything?” he asks, standing up. “I’m gonna go raid the vending machine and I won’t tell if you won’t.” It’s a running joke, and a legitimate offer. Jack is always sneaking her her favorite sugary snacks when she’s stuck eating crummy hospital food. Although, as far as they go, this Swiss trauma center isn’t that bad. She can actually tell it’s food, not vaguely palatable mush. 

But today, not even the promise of candy, even her favorite kinds, can make her smile. 

It’s days like this that she wonders what would have happened if she’d turned Matty Webber’s offer of a career with the CIA down. If she’d taken the fall for what she did and let it all shake out that way. Maybe no one else would be dead if she’d just blown off the second chance and let them send her to prison. Because at least she would only have had a couple ill advised hacks on her conscience, to spend the days and nights with. Now, she’s haunted by ghosts. Almost two dozen people who’ve lost their lives because of her. Some at her own hand. Some because they stood between her and danger. And one because she wasn’t good enough to stop what happened. 

“Hey.” Jack hasn’t left yet, apparently, and he must have noticed her thousand-yard stare. “Hey, talk to me, baby girl.”

“What if all of it was a mistake?” She can’t stop the bitter words. They’ve been swirling around inside her since Nepal, but Jack helped her find ways to drown them out. Now the dam is cracking, and the words are leaking out.

“All of what?” Jack asks. “Como was a shit show, yeah, and we had bad intel, but you did the right thing. You know what they teach you in spy school. You can’t do anything about an op gone wrong if you’re dead. You made the choice that had the highest chance of keeping us all alive. Not your fault it didn’t work out that way for Nick.” 

Riley knows. No one at Phoenix will place the smallest amount of blame on her for handing over the canister.  _ Otherwise Kendrick would have shot me and taken it off my corpse.  _ It’s not a court martial she’s worried about.

“Not that. It’s just...maybe I never should have thought I was good enough to be an agent.”

Jack shakes his head. “Now that is bull. Riles, you’re one of the best agents I’ve seen in my whole career. And you’re only getting better. No one gets it right all the time. I missed those goons just as much as you did. They got the drop on me too, you know.” His hand smoothes back her rough hair. “None of us, no matter how good we are at this job, are perfect. I know you’re looking for someone to blame, and you don’t have Kendrick, so you’re putting it all on yourself. But you’re not the one who pulled that trigger. He did, and we’re gonna find him.”

Riley nods slowly. He’s right. But without Kendrick to blame, her mind is going to keep up the vicious cycle. Reminding her of what she missed. Of how she should have played things. What she should have done. 

“I just think maybe I should have told Matty no.”

“Baby girl, did you even hear what you just said? Because I don’t know how well you know Matty the Hun, but you don’t tell her no.”

That, at least, draws out a weak chuckle that Riley can’t quite stamp down. Jack only used that nickname whenever he was well out of earshot of their former boss. Patty Thornton isn’t quite as much a stickler about nicknames, but Riley does know that she doesn’t like being called ‘Peppermint Patty’. At all. There’s a note on Jack’s electronic file about that. One he clearly never bothered to open. 

Jack’s probably right. Riley remembers that recruitment. Well, recruitment is putting it kindly. She was in cuffs in a holding room, listening to Matty offer her the choice between putting her skills to work for the CIA or spending the next five years of her life in a maximum security prison. 

And the rebellious little voice inside her said they were actually rolling out the red carpet for her to get inside the belly of the beast. To go toe to toe with the kind of people she was trying to take down from the outside. And then somewhere along the way, she’d changed. 

_ Not somewhere. With Jack _ . 

She’d hated authority figures ever since Elwood left her with a metric ton of childhood trauma and abandonment issues. But Jack had showed her people didn’t have to use their power that way. That they could use it to defend. To help. 

And most days, that’s enough for her. But then there are the days when all their skills, all their training, all their good intentions, aren’t enough. 

“No matter what you’re telling yourself right now, you belong here,” Jack says, stepping around so he can sit on her good side and pull her a little closer to him. His fingers tangle in her hair and his voice is soft. “It never gets easier. So I won’t tell you it will. But you know I know what it’s like to live with walking away. And I know you well enough to know you’re strong enough to survive it too.”

Riley nods, just a little. Jack wears his heart on his sleeve even more than she does. She’s sure it’s the meds making her this emotional and vocal about it. She knows how much Jack grieves every agent they lose on an op. How it tears out a part of him that he’ll never get back. And she thinks the only reason he’s not currently even more upset than she is, about Nick, is that he’s focusing right now on what he can do about the situation. Which is get her on the road to recovery. And he’s got to be stamping down his own demons to do that.

“I’m sorry,” She whispers, leaning against his shoulder even as it makes her neck ache and pulls her stitches. “I’m kind of monopolizing the pity party.” 

“You’re the one in the hospital bed. You’re allowed to do that.” Jack gently runs his fingers through her hair, then helps her sit up a little while he starts braiding it. It won’t completely salvage the damage that was done when the hospital staff washed the blood and lake scum out of it, but it’ll at least keep her curls a little healthier. She’d have done it before, but she can’t with her arm like this. 

Jack is gentle, and Riley’s always found having her hair braided to be soothing. She lets the feeling of the fingers on her scalp and tugging gently at the ends of her hair slow her breathing and calm her spiraling thoughts. 

Eventually, it will be his turn to rage at the unfairness of all of this. And her turn to be the voice of reason. But for now, this is okay. 


End file.
